How to Increase Diggs Via Email & Instant Messenger

Neil Patel has a short and simple post today over at Pronet Advertising with the message against “Spamming Digg through Instant Messenger.”

Neil’s theory is that if you IM 20 of your friends pointing them to the page on Digg with your story on it, asking them to Digg it, Digg should be able to flag these Diggs as spam since these users came directly to your story on Digg.

But when you spam your AIM buddy list and get people to click on a direct link to a Digg story URL it shows up in Digg’s logs that they came directly to that URL. If I were running a social site like Digg the first thing I would think of when I see this is that someone is trying to game the system. How can 20 or so people (if not more) from different IPs throughout the world know the exact URL of a story that just got posted to Digg?

Good point Neil, that’s tight!

I’d go further and say not to email people with your direct link to Digg since those referrals will also be direct referrals to your Digg story.

In addition, referrals from emails, Yahoo Mail, GMail and IM devices can be tracked by some analytics companies. So if Digg see’s a bunch of email or IM clicks coming over to stories submitted via your profile or stories to your URL, your profile or site could be banned by Digg.

You wouldn’t want that to happen would you?

So, instead of getting yourself banned from Digg for such irresponsible marketing techniques, here’s what you do.

Place a Digg button on your site, page or individual blog post.

Place other Social buttons like StumbleUpon, Del.icio.us & Reddit too.

Once your site is submitted to Digg, SU or other social sites then contact your friends

When you send them the link via IM or email, do not send them directly to Digg

Instead, send them to your own site, page or blog post

Tell them (or ask) to check it, Digg it, Stumble it, or whatever

But make sure they do so directly from your site, this way the people Digging your site are the audience of your site, not indiviual users and referrals to Digg